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The Reality of Solopreneur Life: The Ups and Downs of Software Development and Side Projects [Journey in Coding] #8
December 2022, Anonymous Purchasing
Allowing Anonymous Purchases
From time to time I would get an email from someone asking me how to buy the app. I’d tell them :
“Create an account, and then go to the subscribe page, then click one of the plans”.
This was happening because I didn’t show a link to the pricing page until a user created an account and logged in. I started thinking “Why not just let people buy immediately, even without an account”. One thing I always say is “If you want someone to do something, make it as easy as possible for them to do it.”
When I was a working stiff, I’d often get messages from colleagues saying
“Please approve my pull request.”
They wanted me to approve their pull request, but they didn’t make it as easy as possible for me to do so. One improvement would be including the link.
“Please approve this pull request. [LINK]”
Then I don’t have to remember the name of their repository, find it on GitHub and find the pull request they made. Let’s get back to talking about my anonymous purchase feature.
Plan
- Show the pricing page to anonymous users.
- Change the payment API so that we can accept payments from anonymous users. This meant removing the requirement that the payment API has an Authorization header.
- When someone buys anonymously, store their email address in the anonymous_purchase table.
- When someone buys anonymously, send them an email telling them to register. Stripe requires users to provide an email address when buying.
- When a user registers, check the anonymous_purchase record. If their email is in there, give them the appropriate amount of credits for the plan they purchased.
Before coding a feature I usually break it up into steps like that. Read it and think “Yes very good that makes sense”. Then I might break it up into little tasks. Here’s how I broke down the above plan into little tasks.
Surprisingly tons of people buy before creating an account.
This was really strange to me. If I can try out a product I will try it out before buying. I guess some people think “Bank Statement Converter? Hell yeah! Take my money right now Angus Cheng”. Or perhaps someone recommended it to them, gave them a demo and they thought “Very nice, I’m going to buy that right now”.
12 Apps of Christmas
Jacalyn helped me get featured in an Australian Facebook group full of accountants. This led to quite a few sales. Thanks Jacalayn! For a long time I was trying to figure out where accountants hang out, turns out it’s in Facebook groups. Makes sense.
The rest of the month I spent in France visiting my Mum, Sister and her family. It was nice.
End of Month Numbers
January 2023, Social Media Monitor
Social Share Buttons
I got the idea to implement social share buttons. They’re pretty easy to implement, so I figured it couldn’t hurt.
In the thirteen months since I implemented this feature the social share buttons have been pressed 32 times. Those 32 button clicks resulted in one person signing up. That one new sign up resulted in $0 of revenue.
So there you go, a day’s worth of work resulted in one new person signing up and $0 in extra revenue.
SocialMediaMonitor.io
At the end of the month a friend wanted to build an app for social media monitoring. He got the idea from MentionTools.com he saw they were doing well and thought “We could do that too”. I liked the idea, and figured it would be something people wanted. I was also excited to work with my friend.
My friend is mostly a backend developer, just like me. I didn’t want to build the UI, so I once again pitched the idea to Dominic. He was in Hong Kong for about a week so I met up with him and Kris and presented the idea to him while going on a hike to an abandoned resort.
Dom liked the idea and agreed to build the UI for it. Great!
End of Month Numbers
March 2023, Monitoring Ends
Not much happens with Bank Statement Converter.
Dom Leaves
On March 9 2023 Dom leaves Social Media Monitor. Kris and I don’t really want to do the UI so we just kind of leave the project dormant. I’ll talk a bit more about Social Media Monitor in the Failed Projects chapter.
End of Month Numbers
May 2023, I Sleep
Nothing special happens with Bank Statement Converter. I fix issues with documents as always.
AngusForm.com
I get the idea to automate some real world processes. Things like applying for a driver’s licence. In Hong Kong most people fill in a form, print it out, sign it and take it to a government office to apply for a driver’s licence.
I started thinking “What if I provided a service that would do this for them, so they can apply for a licence online and someone from my company will hand in the form”.
I’ll talk more about AngusForm.com in the Failed Projects section later on.
End of Month Numbers
September 2023, Custom Pricing
Custom Pricing
A lot of people start asking me for high volume pricing. Sometimes they want pricing in their own currency. So I created an API that lets me create custom pricing so that I can define the number of pages, the currency and the payment amount.
It then gives me a URL I can send a user to pay for their plan at that price. This saves me an hour or two of work every month or so. Somewhat useful I suppose.
End of Month Numbers
November 2023, Busty Barrister
I started working on a visual novel game where you play as a barrister in Hong Kong. It’s called Busty Barrister Barbara. I’m still working on this at the moment so it doesn’t belong in the Failed Projects or Successful Projects sections yet.
You can play it here:
https://ballerindustries.itch.io/busty-barrister
End of Month Numbers
In the next episode, I'll provide a comprehensive summary of both my failed and successful projects, offering insights and lessons learned from each experience.
Written by Angus Cheng (Link)
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